Cohort Stories: Meet Sebastian
vol. 5, no. 78 — guest post by Sebastian Rosario
I’m most proud of being Hispanic. Hispanic people all around the world share similarities that I just love to analyze and relate to. Comparing and contrasting the differences in each Hispanic culture around the world is very interesting to me and I wouldn’t trade being Hispanic for anything. More specifically, I’m proud of being Dominican. From the values, culture, music, camaraderie, everything makes me proud to say I come from the Dominican Republic. I recently started getting more and more educated about Dominican culture by learning about the history of the island, the influence that the Natives had on everyday language in the Dominican Republic, and listening to and exploring all the music that’s being produced today by Dominican artists.
I pride myself in being family oriented, hardworking, and tenacious. I am unabashedly Dominican.
I always loved puzzles since I was a child all the way up until present day. Tinkering with things and figuring out the mechanisms that make it function always captured me for hours at a time. If I could figure out the rules of a system, the entertainment for me was figuring out ways to game those rules or circumvent them. I found this specific kind of entertainment again in the form of video games when Minecraft released around 2010. I still remember being fascinated by that game and taking interest in the way the code worked. I looked up videos of people decompiling the code of the game and adding their own code to gain certain abilities they were not supposed to have, circumventing the rules of the games by knowing something other players were not aware of.
This made me more excited to gain more knowledge in technology and especially in cybersecurity as I drew similarities between puzzles and figuring out the vulnerabilities in a system and attacking them.
The thing that motivates me most about my future is the ability to not stagnate in life. One thing that makes me uncomfortable is getting comfortable in a routine. In a routine, I feel like it’s easy to not evolve as a person, lose the desire for learning, and be content in the known and familiar. I want to become content and comfortable in the unknown, learning new skills and navigating my life as it comes. Having a career in cybersecurity will help me achieve this goal as it is an ever-evolving landscape of new vulnerabilities and exploits that someone in the field has to adapt to, to do their job correctly.
